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It's already the case. Any web page can use WebGL1/2 for general computation. As the author said:

> Using GPUs for calculations of any kind is often called General-Purpose GPU or GPGPU, and WebGL 1 is not great at this. If you wanted to process arbitrary data on the GPU, you have to encode it as a texture, decode it in a shader, do your calculations and then re-encode the result as a texture. WebGL 2 made this a lot easier with Transform Feedback



True, but this API will make that use case simple and obvious. Given the tradeoffs, probably worth it for user agents to permission-gate it.


I think the problem is presenting this to users in terms they’ll all understand. “This site wants to do a special kind of processing”? “Use more resources”? I can’t think of many good answers. Anything involving the term “GPU” is immediately going to confuse most.


You can always disable hardware acceleration in your browser.


I don’t want to disable it, I want websites to have to ask permission before they get access to even more hardware resources.


That's a big red lever that disables all sites' ability to use WebGL also, isn't it? That kind of thing is the kind of thing I imagine one would want at site-by-site granularity.


I'm still hoping that someone will revive uMatrix and add new columns for GPU access and other webshittery.




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